Microsoft Copilot Freemium

Microsoft Copilot is a free AI assistant from Microsoft that answers questions, writes drafts and generates images in Windows, Edge, Android and iOS. The consumer app costs nothing; Copilot Pro runs $20/month and a Copilot licence inside Microsoft 365 is $30 per user/month.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

Copilot started life as Bing Chat in early 2023. It runs on OpenAI’s GPT models plus Microsoft’s own Prometheus orchestration layer, which pulls in Bing search results before the model answers. That search grounding is the main difference between Copilot and a plain chatbot: ask about today’s news and it cites live pages instead of guessing.

The odd part is the naming. “Copilot” now covers at least four separate products — the consumer chat app, the Windows sidebar, GitHub Copilot for code, and the M365 Copilot licence for Word, Excel and Teams. They behave differently and bill differently. This page is about the chat assistant, not the developer or Office one.

What can Microsoft Copilot do?

• Model choice: the free tier defaults to GPT-4o-class reasoning and lets you switch to a “Think Deeper” mode built on OpenAI’s reasoning models.
• Image generation: free DALL-E 3 images directly in chat, with a daily boost limit that resets.
• Voice and vision: talk to it hands-free on mobile and point your camera at text, product labels or equations for OCR-style answers.
• Web grounding: every answer can carry footnote citations to Bing-indexed sources.
• File reading: upload PDFs, Word docs and screenshots; the free tier handles files up to roughly 20 MB.
• Modes: Quick, Think Deeper and a Deep Research mode that spends minutes compiling a cited report.

Product Highlights

Distribution is the real selling point. Copilot ships preinstalled on Windows 11 as a taskbar button, lives in the Edge sidebar, and is a standalone app on iOS and Android. You do not install it — you sign in with a Microsoft account and it is already there. On Windows 11 it can also see your screen and act on it (clicking, typing, summarising open windows), though the deeper agentic features need a Copilot+ PC with a 40+ TOPS NPU.

Copilot Pro at $20/month adds priority access during peak hours, newer models first, and the AI features inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. That last one is thin compared to the business licence. If Office document integration is what you actually want, Pro will feel like a half-measure.

What is Microsoft Copilot good for?

• Quick drafts of emails, cover letters and meeting agendas without opening a new tab.
• Summarising a PDF report while you are already working in Edge.
• Hands-free voice research on a phone during a commute.
• Generating a stock-style image for a slide when nobody has a licence for a design tool.
• Turning a rough paragraph into bullet points for a Teams message.

Where Microsoft Copilot falls short

Answers skew cautious. Copilot refuses or hedges on topics ChatGPT handles directly, which gets annoying when you want a blunt opinion. The free image allowance runs out fast if you generate in batches, and conversation history sync across Windows, Edge and mobile is inconsistent — threads you started on desktop sometimes do not show up in the app.

Privacy is the other trade-off. Your prompts and chat history sit with Microsoft and feed product improvement unless you turn that off in settings. For casual tasks that is fine. For anything confidential, check your organisation’s data policy first — the consumer app is not covered by enterprise data protection.

Quick Summary

• Microsoft Copilot is free; Copilot Pro costs $20/month and the M365 Copilot licence is $30 per user/month.
• It runs on GPT-class models with live Bing search grounding, so it can cite current web pages.
• Best fit: Windows and Microsoft 365 users who want AI one click away.
• Weakest point: heavy refusals, capped free image generation, and history sync that drops between devices.
• Last updated: September 2026.